editing

In a rare but welcome turn of events, this week I read three thoughtful deep dives about content management systems.

1

I found myself nodding a lot at this Mediashift piece that discussed how magazines can better use analytics to determine their digital focus. Some highlights:

“We watch numbers on each of these platforms and determine what platforms can have a rich workflow and rich experience, and where we want to enhance the content with video. We also have replica editions where people are happy with just a flipbook. We make decisions on a per-platform basis [by considering] the return on investment of any of these.” —Kerrie Keegan, Reader’s Digest

“All of the different platforms — not even just production platforms like Mag+, Zinio, Adobe DPS, but also Apple versus Google versus Amazon versus Next Issue — all of those have a different set of analytics and metrics that can be obtained. Those really differ widely. It’s one of the core challenges for anybody trying to publish in this space and across those markets…. The challenges aren’t really technical at this point. The challenges are what I call infrastructure. In print, we all know what rate base is, what CPMs are going to be, what metrics we pay attention to. We don’t have the same infrastructure for monetizing digital. From an advertising point of view, does rate base matter, or is it interaction, engagement, time in app?” —Mike Haney, Mag+

2

This excellent piece from Neiman Lab gets into the inner workings of Scoop, the New York Times‘s CMS, with Luke Vnenchak. The parts I found most interesting had to do with something I always advocate: better integration of basic editorial functions, such as, oh, I don’t know, editing words, into CMSes.

Scoop incorporates a number of real-time editing options that might look familiar to Google Docs users. Different team members can work on different parts of a story at the same time: “For example, a reporter can work on the article while an editor is writing the headline and summary and a producer is adding multimedia. But one editor can’t work on the headline while another works on the summary.”

Isn’t it amazing that this very basic functionality is so hard to come by in most off-the-shelf CMSes? Additionally, for being content management systems, most CMSes are abysmal at actually managing content in the editorial sense:

One thing that is always handy in newsrooms is a system for tracking the status of stories as they move from assigning and writing to editing. Beyond knowing the status of an article, Vnenchak said they want the system to track when stories run online and in print, and how a story is performing once it’s published.

Our asks as editors are quite standard, if not primitive, from a content-making standpoint. Something as essential as status tracking being incorporated into a CMS should be common, not rare.

3

Finally, an intriguing post that could indicate the end of cobbled together, homegrown editorial CMSes. Much can be said about Google, but even its detractors have to admit that when the company puts its mind to doing something, it gets done. That something might soon be a CMS “that would unify editorial, advertising and perhaps commerce activities for media companies.”

The so-far-untapped opportunity that Google is chasing — articulated with greater frequency this year in ad tech circles — is to take a holistic approach to managing yield that spans multiple publisher revenue sources and screen form factors.

The idea that a editorial-based, unifying CMS hasn’t yet been developed is rather shocking in itself. But the arguments the article makes against Google developing such a product are the pinnacle of self-reproach and shame. It’s almost as though all of online publishing has been told by its shrieking mother, “This is why we can’t have nice things!” and internalized the message:

A CMS could be a tough sell for Google, especially as a number of publishers have lately staked their future on the strength of a proprietary CMS. Three prominent examples are Vox Media, whose vaunted Chorus CMS is considered its secret sauce, BuzzFeed, which has baked native advertising into its content platform, and The New York Times, where technology-powered storytelling is seen as core to its editorial and advertising mission. For such publishers, adopting a CMS from a large platform player like Google would be tantamount to outsourcing the very notion of innovation.

Additionally many established publishers have customized their content tools to integrate with legacy publishing systems. Many publishers use multiple CMSs, for instance a custom platform powered by Drupal alongside WordPress for blogging. So there’s a big technical hurdle to adopting any off-the-shelf solution Google has on offer. That’s setting aside the technical and human resources barriers required to migrate away from “good enough” content systems.

This last part reminds me of the great Aimee Mann song “Momentum”: “But I can’t confront the doubts I have/I can’t admit that maybe the past was bad/And so, for the sake of momentum/I’m condemning the future to death/So it can match the past.”

It seems obvious that we should embrace enhancements to CMSes for editorial, be they analytics, metrics, platforms, workflows, or appropriate ad-edit collaboration.

I’ve spent the past month helping edit a book. A real, old-timey, printed-pages book, with big photos and tons of words. While it has been an all-consuming grind to move the thing from words on a screen to designed layout to perfected page, creating a book also opened my eyes even further to a handful of differences between the print and online worlds of publishing. I suppose I knew these differences abstractly — after all, I’ve worked in the print publishing world for a more than a decade and I’ve written about some of these variations before — but living the book-publishing life instead of the online-publishing one for a month solid has put these five distinctions into stark relief.

1. Standardized technology
Practically the entire print world (magazines as well) uses Adobe’s Creative Suite. If you’re a publisher, you’re using InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator, period. Occasionally there are major disruptions — when the industry moved from QuarkXPress to InDesign around the turn of the century, for example, after having been Quark-centric for the previous half-dozen years. If a stranger wandered in off the street to a prepress shop or printer, they’d see InDesign being used. If a college kid majors in graphic design, she’d better be taught to use Illustrator. If you’re a photographer or retoucher, Photoshop is your go-to.

Compare this to the completely opposite world of online publishing. There’s not a standard content management system that every publisher uses. Open-source platforms like WordPress and Drupal are huge and growing — they’re being selected as the go-to CMSes more every day — but they’re not widespread enough to be called a standard, at least not the way InDesign is for print publishers. More often, each Internet publishing site has its own, homegrown, cobbled together, Frankenstein half-solution, which works well enough to connect A to B, but just barely, and it is not a complete solution in the way that Adobe Creative Suite has been for print.

There’s also no standard photo-editing app: Photoshop is one option for online photo editing, but so are Pixlr, Aviary, Gimp, on and on. Even Facebook and Twitter — not to mention Instagram — offer online photo editing.

In fact, Internet publishing reminds me of nothing more than print in the 1980s and 1990s. Computers were being introduced and used to some degree for word processing, but there was no single software system for print publishing. We’d moved well beyond copy boys, news alerts coming across actual wires and traditional typesetting, but the “technology” that most publishers used then included paste-ups and X-acto knives (or some version thereof). We’re living the equivalent now online. Will the Internet standardize to a single CMS? Will there be a turnkey solution invented that takes online publishing from primordial to fully evolved?

2. Established process and workflow
The printed word carries with it an established process, one that has been more or less the way things have worked since Gutenberg. First you write the words, then you edit them, then you publish them. This is true still in print publishing. Broadly: brainstorm, assign, write, edit (line edit, fact-check, copyedit), design, prep, print, and then distribute completed, unalterable product. There are often many rounds of each of these steps, and distribution can be a months-long process. But a process it is, and one that carries a fixed order and a good degree of finality.

Online publishing, on the other hand, usurps this process from end to end; the online workflow is not fixed. Anyone can devise her own ideas and then write them. They needn’t be edited nor fact-checked, but even if they are, many people and even organizations publish first and edit later, and then republish. This doesn’t actually disrupt the distribution process a bit, because the piece is a living document that can always be changed. The immediate distribution means that readers can also respond immediately, and they do, via comments and social media, and this often precipitates yet another round of reediting and republishing.

Compare the reactions of print versus online outlets to the publishing scandal of the summer: Jonah Lehrer’s making up of quotes and self-plagiarization. His book publisher, Houghton, had to “halt shipment of physical copies of the book and [take] the e-book off the market,” as well as offer refunds to readers who purchased copies of the book. Presumably, they will actually fact-check the book sometime, then issue a new version in a new print run sometime before…who knows when.

Lehrer’s online publishers, on the other hand, merely republished his pieces with an “Editor’s Note” appended that they “regret the duplication of material” (NewYorker.com) or a “notice indicating some work by this author has been found to fall outside our editorial standards” (Wired.com).

I haven’t discussed the cost-as-expectation factor because I want to limit this post to my observances on technology and workflow as an industry insider, but I do wonder whether, because the Internet is free, the standards are lower for both process and product. Regardless, it’s clear that making corrections as you go along isn’t possible with a printed product once it’s been distributed.

I also think that because the Internet is not only a publishing business but is also a technology business in a way that print is not, editors are cribbing from technologists’ desire to embrace iterative methodologies and workflows, such as Agile (in relief to Waterfall) — more on this below.

3. Clearly defined roles and responsibilities
Hand in hand with the process itself are the people who conduct the process. Print, having been around for centuries, has evolved to the point where jobs are delineated. It can be stated generally that in the world of print, photographers shoot pictures and photo editors select among these pictures. Designers marry text and art. Copy editors edit copy. Printers print. Managing editors meet deadlines, collaborating with all parties to get things where they need to be when they need to be there. There’s no such delineation in the online publishing world. Editors in chief shoot photos and video; copy editors crop art; writers publish. Everyone does a little bit of everything: It’s slapdash, it’s uncivilized, it’s unevolved.

I think that soon this madness will organize itself into more clearly defined roles, or else we’ll all burn out, go crazy and move to yurts in the middle of Idaho. This is happening already in small degrees in online newsrooms, and it’s starting to reach into online publishing broadly, but I have to believe that the insanity will decrease and the explicit definition of roles will advance as we sort out how it all fits together.

4. Focused, respectful meetings
It caught me off guard to realize that something as simple as speaking to coworkers is very different in the print versus online worlds, but the meetings I had when I was working on the book were a far cry from those I’ve had when I was working online. They were focused, with little posturing, corporate speak, agenda pushing or bureaucracy. At no point did anyone say, “Let’s take that offline” (translation: “Shut up”). At no point did I wonder, “Are you answering email or IMing the person across the table right now instead of paying attention to what I’m saying?” It’s pretty simple: No (or few) laptops and lots of respect for others and their abilities.

Technology likes to put labels onto concepts that publishing has been using for decades. For example, Agile has concepts like “stand-ups” and “Scrum.” Print has been having these sorts of as-needed-basis check-ins as long as it’s been around — it’s called “talking to your coworkers,” and it works quite well as a method of communication and dissemination of information. For all that’s going against it, print succeeds on a human level; technologists are playing catch-up in this respect. Whether this is because most technologists are men or most technologists are introverts I’m not sure, but the cultural and human-interaction differences are clear. If online publishing did a little more in the way of focused and respectful meetings — or maybe even fewer organized meetings and more on-the-fly collaboration — I think the industry would reap major benefits.

5. Frequency of disruption by and importance placed on email and social media
When I was head’s-down editing on paper for this book, and when I was on the computer editing, devising schedules or creating task lists, I didn’t check email, Facebook, Twitter, or really any other website except during lunch. Turns out, this behavior is fairly easy to do when you’re not working on a website yourself. I’ll admit that I felt a little out of the loop on the latest stupid thing Mitt Romney said. I missed the uproar about, next-day recap of, and explanatory cultural essay regarding Honey Boo-Boo. But I didn’t actually feel less engaged with the world. Having been completely engaged in the task at hand, I felt like the focused energy I was able to pour into the book benefited the work and my own sense of accomplishment.

When I work online I often end days thinking, “What did I actually do today? Meetings, emails, checking social media…now the day is over, and what do I have to show for it?” Quite distinctly, when I ended days on the book, I could say with conviction that what I had worked on mattered. I moved whatever I was working on from one state to the next, and I improved it when it was in my hands. It was a welcome departure.

—
The book will be in stores a few months. And I’m about to press “publish” on this post, which will then be live and available to anyone with an Internet connection the moment after I do. All of which serves as the starkest reminder yet about the benefits of, drawbacks surrounding and often chasm-like differences between each medium. Unlike print, for online publishing the history is being written as its being lived, and I feel privileged to be a witness to it.

Wired‘s recent story about Narrative Science seems to have put some journalists into a bit of a tizz. The article is a must-read for journalists and coders — really interesting tidbits about what’s going on in this field now, and what might come to pass in the future.

I’m actually very excited about the possibilities of Narrative Science, an artificial intelligence product that transforms data (currently primarily from the sports and finance world) into stories. This is the exact kind of thing we’re after when we encourage J-Schools to put software engineering into journalism curricula so we can teach young journalists valuable new skills so they, in turn, can not end up helpless on the sidelines, as many of us current journos have been during the technology advances of the last decade.

The method does not determine the value

Narrative Science is not a threat, it’s a tool, and it fills a need. Instead of some capable writer poring over boring financial statements and trying to add sizzle in reporting on them, a machine reads the data and spits out two grafs. Two serviceable but really snoozy grafs, which probably would have happened if written by a human, too.

Here’s what’s intriguing, though: Narrative Science is working on ways to be not-snoozy, and in so doing they’re calling journalists on our BS, in a way. What I mean is this: Journalists have formulas. We do, and they’re taught in schools and learned on the job. “Reverse pyramid.” “Nut graf.” “Lede.” “Attribution.” These are plug-and-play tactics most of the time. Sure, these elements vary from story to story, and that is the fun part of what we do. We add details and context. We observe and report. But at core, we tell different stories using some slightly different combinations of these tactics and tools.

Arguably, feature stories have slightly more variety, but I’d also point out that (sadly) many features are also just puzzle pieces, if not downright parodies of themselves. For example, every feature on every female celebrity ever starts this way:

“[Lady celeb] walks into [L.A.’s or New York’s] [restaurant or cafe in trendy neighborhood] looking gorgeous in [brand] jeans and no makeup.”

Whether the editors or writers are making the words hacky, hacky they are — and boring, just like the pieces Narrative Science is creating with its algorithmic journalism. Fascinatingly, according to Wired, the company actually has “meta-writers” whose job it is to help the computers add context:

“[Meta-writers are] trained journalists who have built a set of templates. They work with the engineers to coach the computers to identify various ‘angles’ from the data. Who won the game? Was it a come-from-behind victory or a blowout? Did one player have a fantastic day at the plate? The algorithm considers context and information from other databases as well: Did a losing streak end?”

But to answer the question posed in the headline of the piece, “Can an Algorithm Write a Better News Story Than a Human Reporter?” for now the answer is no. And journalists vs. algorithms is a faulty comparison.

Writers and editors add value using tools

Narrative Science, thanks to algorithms created by human engineers and journalists, is now at the level of being able to programmatically spit out phrases like “whacking home runs.” But it can’t gauge a crowd’s restlessness or excitement. It can’t interview a superfan after the game, sense that he’s fed up with the team and write a mood piece. It can’t connect on a human level to a victim of a crime, or spend days following a subject then put together disparate threads of the subject’s life into a coherent portrait.

Which is why it’s not a real threat just yet. The way I see it:

Narrative Science : journalists : : spell-check : copy editors

It’s a tool that does a programmatic task, but not a contextual one, as well as a human. Does spell-check tell you you have the wrong “hear/here”? No. Does it correct you when you’ve spelled “embarrassing” incorrectly because it is drawing from an enormous database of correctly spelled words? Sure, easy enough. Can it check a fact’s accuracy against a thousand links on the Internet? Probably. But can it call a source and make sure she wasn’t misquoted, then correct the quote before publication? Not likely.

Context is everything, and it’s ours to use. But we journalists have to use it. Yes, we have formulas. We write ledes, and we edit the story so the most important information is up front. But we have to step up our game. We have to go to the match, or the crime scene, or the meeting, or the fashion show, or the foreign city, or the war, and add context for readers. We shouldn’t hack our way through the really interesting stuff — we shouldn’t be allowed to. Let’s let bottom-scrapers scrape the bottom for us. Let’s not waste human effort on shitty content farms that pay $2 (!) an article. Let’s leave that for robots and invest elsewhere: in hiring more and better writers and editors to make connections, describe the atmosphere, make sense of things, tease out themes and (cue dramatic music) better humanity. Let’s invest in creating data and algorithms that we can program to help us help ourselves.

Makes complete sense to me. The problem in my experience is one Vultee saw in his study as well: “We know [editors] add value, but since they don’t add content it’s been hard to make a specific case of how they add value.”

When it’s hard to explain how you add value, it’s hard to argue against getting laid off. But clearly editors do add value, as the study notes, especially among women readers — it’s just that the value is added in ways other than dollars and cents, which is difficult to justify to the types who look only at the bottom line. But the feelings of trust and professionalism are ones that brands should cultivate, not get rid of. Never has the saying “the invisible hand of the editor” been more ironic.

Interesting peek at what happens when personalization by way of automation and algorithms takes a dark turn.

“Unlike tabloid television, algorithmic personalization does not announce that it’s pandering to base interests. When sensationalized reports about violence against children are on TV, I can change the channel — an act that is harder to do on the Internet when seemingly ‘neutral’ spaces, like Yahoo’s homepage, leave no tell-tale trace of manipulation. You can’t change the channel when you don’t know you’re watching the program.”

Another argument in favor of the human curator (read: editor) as we stumble through sorting out what can be programmed, what should never be, and where the middle ground is.

Really interesting piece on treating content as a product and what that means for scaled production, if there is such a thing:

“You can’t apply industrial-age economics to content production. Content doesn’t get cheaper as the volume goes up. Unlike Ford’s automobiles, the cost of quality content goes up with the volume because content production involves skilled labour and very few economies of scale. Plenty of organisations try to work around this hard fact using various forms of automation.”

The author’s point is that it’s a gamble to “churn content without a plan”:

“While automated tools can be useful, letting general trending topics or ill-chosen metrics replace a strong editorial strategy will drive the relevance of your content down. Licensed or crowd-sourced content will rarely be tailored for your audience’s needs, the tone of voice they are most accustomed to, etc. Every mismatch drives relevance down and reduces your chances of the gamble ever paying off.”

I’d further argue that, content-wise, in the age of social sharing and a meme a minute, tone and trust are everything.

Perhaps the editor part is more wishful thinking than reality — there is certainly something to be said for humans make better automations in the future, too — but nonetheless I like the boldness of the prediction:

“But while algorithms once threatened to replace gatekeepers, online media will see a move back to the future: professional, human filters (the artists formerly known as editors) will play an integral role in the next web after all.”